The question mark above the creature's head flickered once, as though mocking anyone bold enough to try measuring its strength.
Ethan didn't have time to ask what it meant for even the System to be unable to read a level, because Kael had already moved, pulling him back from the cliff's edge with a grip far stronger than a body that looked so thin and battered should have possessed.
"Don't just stand there," Kael hissed, his eyes still fixed on the towering figure approaching from the valley's mist. "An anomaly with no readable level isn't something the two of us can fight, especially not you, when you don't even know how to use your own ability yet."
The man in the gray robe who had attacked them now did an about-face, stepping away from the cliff, his face drained of all color. "I'm not part of this," he said quickly, his voice stripped of every ounce of the superior tone he'd shown Ethan earlier. "My job was only to bring back the vessel, not to deal with whatever just rose from the ruins of Aldmere."
"Aldmere?" Ethan repeated the name, because for some reason, something inside his chest—something that felt like an echo of Kael's memories that had flowed into his head earlier—reacted to that name with a fear far older than anything he had ever experienced.
Kael turned to look at him sharply, his expression shifting to wariness. "You felt it," he said, not asking a question. "My memories. Part of my memories traveled with the System when you touched it earlier."
Before Ethan could answer, the ground beneath their feet trembled harder, and the towering figure was finally close enough to be seen clearly—not a scaled, fanged creature like the ones Ethan had once imagined from the fantasy stories he used to read, but something resembling an empty suit of armor, walking without flesh or bone inside it, purple cracks of light glowing along the seams of its metal joints.
[Warning: Entity Partially Identified. Name: Hollow Guardian. Origin: Ruins of Aldmere.] [System Note: This entity should not be able to move without a command from the rightful owner of its vessel.]
That last word made Kael freeze for a moment, his eyes widening with something far beyond ordinary fear. "That's not possible," he whispered, more to himself than anyone else. "That Guardian should have slept forever after I sealed that chamber. No one knows how to wake it again, unless—"
He didn't finish the sentence, but his eyes shifted quickly toward Ethan, and that look twisted something new in Ethan's stomach, something far more personal than the fear of the towering creature drawing ever closer.
"Unless what?" Ethan pressed, though part of him could already guess the answer would drag him even deeper into a problem he didn't yet fully understand.
"Unless someone is carrying a part of my soul," Kael said quietly, "and the Guardian believes that soul is still whole inside its own body. It isn't chasing us, Ethan. It's chasing you, because it thinks you're me, returned."
The Hollow Guardian stopped its advance right at the base of the cliff, its faceless head tilting slowly upward toward the three of them, and the purple cracks of light along its body pulsed brighter, as though adjusting itself to something it had just discovered.
A voice emerged from within the empty suit of armor—not a human voice, but a resonance that seemed to come from hundreds of throats at once, speaking in one uniformly flat tone.
"The young master has returned," the voice echoed, shaking the air around them. "The seal will be opened."
Kael lunged forward at once, trying to place himself between Ethan and the creature, but it was too late. The purple light that had only been pulsing between the seams of the armor now burst outward, forming a massive circle of light beneath the feet of all three of them, an intricate pattern that began spinning faster and faster, dragging in anything standing within it.
Ethan felt the ground beneath his feet vanish, replaced by the same falling sensation he'd felt the very first time he'd been pulled into this world.
[Warning: Aldmere Seal Forced Open. Host and Rightful Owner Pulled Together.]
And before Ethan could even scream, the world around him collapsed into total darkness.